ernoon?"

When Sheila rode her pony she always rode toward The Hill. But in that
direction she had never allowed Sylvester to take her. She looked vaguely
through the wind-shield now and said, "Anywhere--that canon, the one we
came home by last week. It was so queer."

"It'll be dern dusty, I'm afraid."

"I don't care." Sheila wrapped her gray veil over her small hat which
fitted close about her face. "I'm getting used to the dust. Does it ever
rain around Millings? And does it ever stop blowing?"

"We don't like Millings to-day, do we?"

Sylvester was bending his head to peer through the gray mist of her veil.
She held herself stiffly beside him, showing the profile of a small
Sphinx. Suddenly it turned slightly, seemed to wince back. Girlie, at the
gate of Number 18 Cottonwood Avenue, had stopped to watch them pass.
Girlie did not speak. Her face looked smitten, the ripe fruit had turned
bitter upon her ruddy lips. The tranquil emptiness of her beauty had
filled itself stormily.

Sheila did not answer Hudson's reproachful question. She leaned back,
dropped back, rather, into a tired little heap and let the country slide
by--the strange, wide, broken country with its circling mesas, its
somber grays and browns and dusty greens, its bare purple hills, rocks
and sand and golden dirt, and now and then, in the sudden valley
bottoms, swaying groves of vivid green and ribbons of emerald meadows.
The mountains shifted and opened their canons, gave a glimpse of their
beckoning and forbidding fastnesses and closed them again as though by a
whispered Sesame.

"What was the row last night?" asked Sylvester in his voice of cracked
tenderness. "Carthy says there was a bunch of toughs. Were you scared
good and plenty? I'm sorry. It don't happen often, believe _me._

"I wish you could 'a' heard Carthy talkin' about you, Sheila," went on
Sylvester, his eyes, filled with uneasiness, studying her silence and her
huddled smallness, hands in the pockets of her light coat, veiled face
turned a little away, "Say, that would 'a' set you up all right! Talk
about beacons!"

Here she flashed round on him, as though her whole body had been
electrified. "Tell me all that again," she begged in a voice that he
could not interpret except that there was in it a sound of tears. "Tell
me again about a beacon ..."

He stammered. He was confused. But stumblingly he tried to fulfill her
demand. Here was a thirst for something, and he wanted ab